Man with a message

BRIEF words to the wise, the column two weeks back reproduced a Post Office telegram sent 50 years ago from Shildon to Bishop Auckland Football Club captain Derek Lewin, c/o Barnet FC in Hertfordshire.

Things were different then. E-mails might these days almost be instant, but telegrams could shift a bit, too. Particularly we'd been intrigued by the cipher DL15 after the Shildon address: could it have been an early postcode?

The reaction was a bit like the fabled national steam engine reserve, shedded beneath the Malvern Hills or somewhere to await the coal-fired call. Great ranks of Post Office telegraphists - key workers, as it were - have again lifted a finger to reprise the days of the original cut and paste. Greetings to them all.

JOHN Watkin was just 14 when he became a telegraph boy, 11 shillings for a 48-hour week in Richmond, North Yorkshire. It was 1943.

They wore pill box hats and bright-buttoned tunics, rode bicycles not built for speed but got quickly into gear, nonetheless.

In wartime, much of the telegram traffic was for the Green Howard barracks, a very steep climb - as Richmond folk will recall - from the head post office.

"We might be eight times a day up that hill, no wonder I was so skinny," recalls John, now in Pity Me, near Durham.

"During the war we weren't allowed to ride bikes after dark, so my parents would walk with me, to make sure I was all right."

He remained faithfully on-message for the remainder of his working life and ended up as postmaster at Houghton-le-Spring.

AMONG several other daily telegraphists, we are also indebted to Doris Trees in Darlington, Barbara Goodall in Northallerton and Finbarre Burrow - by new-fangled email - for the explanation of how the word reached Barnet.

All agree that DL15 was simply the number of words originating from Darlington, both Bishop Auckland and "Barnet Herts" generously counting as one.

They also agree that the best-wish list was transmitted from Shildon at 1.18pm, fewer than two hours before kick-off. Mr Burrow supposes that it went from Shildon to Darlington, thence to Leeds and was received in Barnet at 1.31pm.

Though there's some debate about the route - LS731 was simply Darlington's telegraph code, suggests Mrs Goodall - none doubts that it would swiftly have reached its intended destination.

"I used to sit at a teleprinter and send thousands of messages like that," says Doris Trees.

"They'd be carrying it forward almost as soon as it reached Barnet."

On yer bike?

"They might even have walked round, depending on how far it was to the football ground. Sending it at quarter-past-one was ample time: Mr Lewin would definitely have had his telegram by kick-off."

APROPOS of little - but to be exact, of a forthcoming talk to the North-West Durham branch of the Fabian Society - the column a fortnight ago also had cause to recall Darlington-born actress Gladys Boot. She'd appeared in Fabian of the Yard, a 1950s television crime series.

Save that she was 50 when making her stage debut, we had been able to discover little more.

With thanks to Paul Dobson in Bishop Auckland and, particularly, to theatre historian John Foster in Langley Park, near Durham. The column has more satisfactorily been able to fill its Boots - Glad, you might say, all over.

She was the daughter of Canon Alfred Boot, vicar of St John's, Darlington - the church near Bank Top railway station - from 1885-97 - and of the former Catherine Wharrie Maclean, from West Hartlepool.

Canon Boot's picture still hangs at the back of St John's - with thanks to the Rev Mike Dent for permission to reproduce it.

Canon Boot subsequently became vicar of St George's in Jesmond, Newcastle, and it was at Jesmond Playhouse that Gladys first trod the boards, in Quiet Wedding.

Heaven knows what had kept her. The world thereafter was her stage.

JOHN Foster's a remarkable chap, retired Durham County Council employee, lives in a terraced house in Langley Park with a burgeoning collection of theatrical memorabilia from which ever-generously he donates.

"I suppose I'm a bit of a squirrel," he told the John North column three years ago, a man with a well-thumbed cross-reference system held together by bulldog clips and by passion.

He'd especially enjoyed the 50s and 60s, when theatre seemed never to have a final curtain. "When I began you might see Kathleen Harrison, Edith Evans, Cicely Courtneidge and Sybil Thorndike within a week in Newcastle, or spend two weeks in Blackpool and see a different show every night.

"Now they won't leave London, or they're earning much better money in films and television. I'm afraid the theatre isn't what it was."

CROSS-REFERENCED, as a vicar's daughter probably should be, Gladys Boot slips from the pages of John's 13th edition of Who's Who in the Theatre.

She'd made her London debut in 1941 when Quiet Wedding moved to the Wyndham Theatre, played Mary Jarrow more than 1,000 times, became leading lady with the Liverpool Rep.

Several of her roles appear to have been as "ladies" - including Lady Fanciful in The Provoked Wife - another saw her playing Mother Codling in what may almost have been pantomime.

Her film debut was in 1948 in The Blue Lagoon, her New York debut in 1949 and her television bow three years later in Black Limelight.

The girl from St John's vicarage also made 325 appearances as Julia Shuttlethwaite in The Cocktail Party with Donald Houston, Alison Leggatt and Robin Bailey - Uncle Mort, memory suggests, in the wonderful television series I Didn't Know You Cared.

The pictures are from a 1950 edition of Theatre World - from John Foster's collection, of course.

Gladys Boot died, aged 74, in October 1964.

DAVID Walsh, former leader of Redcar and Cleveland council, also recalls speaking to North-West Durham Fabians - meeting, then as now, in the Joiners Arms at Hunwick and a fair old bus ride from Redcar.

His lunchtime talk was to be on regional government, his arrival early, his thirst after such a journey considerable. "It was probably the most animated regional government session for many a day," he recalls.

On a more sober note, what David really wants to tell is the story of the stranger who goes into a baker's on Tyneside. "Is that a doughnut or a meringue?" he asks, pointing to the cake counter.

The assistant's at once helpful. "You're right," he says, "it's a doughnut."

Curtain up again next week